Caged

by Lorelei James

  weasel suckling at the teat of JFW.

  The last image with the Westerman name caught his eye. The caption card beneath the picture read:

  The Westerman twins, Deacon and Dante, enjoying a round of golf with their grandfather, Jefferson.

  Deacon went utterly still. As shocking as it was to see himself with hair, it was even more shocking to realize that he’d seen that face recently. And not in the mirror.

  He raced down the hallway and froze in front of the picture of his cousin Warren.

  The kid looked so much like the Westerman twins at that age, it was uncanny. A warning zipped down his spine and he scrutinized the photo more closely. It went beyond a first-cousin family resemblance—Warren had been adopted and he shouldn’t look anything like them.

  But Warren didn’t look a little like them; he looked exactly like them.

  Head spinning, Deacon fell back onto the bench against the wall and stared at the picture, unable to tear his gaze away from it. He’d lost his virginity at age nineteen. So even if he’d knocked that first girl up . . . Warren was fifteen—not eleven—so the math didn’t work.

  But it worked for Dante.

  He remembered his anger, guilt, and jealousy the night Dante had died, after he’d confessed he’d lost his virginity and he’d been having sex with some girl Deacon didn’t know.

  A girl who’d gotten pregnant?

  A girl who’d given the child up for adoption?

  It couldn’t be coincidence that his aunt Annabelle, who’d tried for years to have a child, had adopted that baby boy.

  Which meant . . . his mother had known Dante had left a child behind. But why wouldn’t she raise the child herself?

  Because she’s a selfish, mean, nasty bitch. She didn’t want you. Why would she want a sniveling kid?

  His stomach twisted. Did his dad know about this?

  There was only one way to find out.

  By the time Deacon reached the private dining room, he’d hit the boiling point. He stalked over to where his mother sat beside his father. He looked around. Didn’t look like his mother had invited her own sister and her family to the party.

  Because someone like Clive or Tag, who’d known him and Dante growing up, might see the resemblance in Warren—even when Deacon himself had blocked it out.

  Last night Warren had said: I wasn’t supposed to come tonight, but I just had to meet you.

  And Clive, when asked about his appearance: Of course I wasn’t invited, but when has that ever stopped me?

  Tag’s surprise this morning: No one told me about the family dinner last night.

  His mother had gone to such trouble to keep it under wraps. Too bad he was about to blow the lid off her motherfucking world. He faced her and said in a tone that hinted at his rage, “Julianne. A word. Now. Outside.”

  She set down her china teacup. “Deacon. Don’t be rude.”

  “You haven’t seen rude yet.”

  His dad looked at him strangely. “What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to you both. Privately.”

  “Bing, dear, do you mind handling it? Gina and I were in the middle of—”

  “I’m sure Dad would love to hear what I have to say about my cousin Warren. Since it appears he’s inherited his grandfather’s love of golf.”

  Julianne didn’t miss a beat. “Gina, will you excuse us?”

  “Of course.”

  Deacon started to walk out of the room.

  “Where are we going?” Julianne demanded.

  He whirled around and loomed over her. “I’d suggest a soundproofed room so your friends don’t learn the truth about what a lying, conniving bitch you are.” He stormed down the hallway, so focused on not losing his shit any more than he already had that he nearly plowed Molly over when she stepped in front of him.

  “Deacon?”

  “Not now.”

  “But I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

  Deacon stopped and glared at his parents, who’d hustled past him and ducked into a room to the left. “So is this. I have to deal with them and this situation I’ve been kept in the fucking dark about. I’ll find you once I’m done.”

  “Do you need me to . . . ?”

  “No.”

  As soon as he was in the room and had shut the door, Deacon exploded. “I don’t have to ask if it’s true, because I can see it with my own eyes. Warren is Dante’s kid, isn’t he?”

  His mother looked over at his father.

  “No. You look me in the fucking eye and tell me why you’d keep something like this from me.”

  Her eyes held the mean glint Deacon knew so well. “Shall I start with the fact you’d already run off when the girl approached me about her pregnancy? We didn’t know where you were for years, Deacon. We weren’t sure we’d ever see you again. So I was supposed to . . . what? Try to track down a sixteen-year-old runaway so I could ask his advice on what to do about his dead brother’s unborn child?”

  “Julianne,” his father murmured.

  Deacon slapped his hands on the table in front of his father. “How long have you known?”

  His dad rubbed the furrow between his brows. “I found out about two weeks after you came back.”

  “And it didn’t bother you that she kept that from you? That she willingly gave your grandson—your only physical link to your dead son—to her sister to raise?”

  “Of course it bothered me. But what was I supposed to do at that point? Rip the boy away from the only parents he’d ever known? Fracture our family even more? Annabelle and Derek adore Warren. He has a happy life and everything he’d ever want or need.”

  Rage continued to build, and Deacon knew he hadn’t hit the point of explosion yet. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down, his fury absolute. “Annabelle and Derek could provide for him better than you could have? Bull. Shit.” He shot his mother a disgusted look. “All because Julianne didn’t want to be called Grandma. God forbid anyone ever thought she could be old enough to have a grandchild. That was it, wasn’t it? Or maybe, since Warren’s birth mother wasn’t a society girl, you were afraid her lower-class traits would appear in your grandson? And how would you ever explain that at the country-club brunch?”

  “Deacon,” his father barked. “That is enough.”

  “You’re trying to muzzle me because you know it’s true. If Aunt Annabelle thinks her sister arranged for a private adoption out of love for her, or the child, she’s got a fucking screw loose. Julianne has never done a goddamn thing if it hasn’t benefitted her. She thought providing Aunt Annabelle the child she’d wanted for so long made her selfless, but it’s the most selfish thing she’s ever done. Julianne didn’t want the boy, but she couldn’t quite let him go either.”

  “You have no idea what I went through,” his mother retorted. “Your recklessness killed two people, Deacon.”

  Recklessness? It was a fucking accident.

  “The scandal that followed . . . You were a surly teen who didn’t see it, and even if you had, you wouldn’t have cared. It destroyed our lives. We had to move because the hatred for us in the community was so thick that I couldn’t show my face anywhere. Everyone—and I mean everyone—assumed your father had bought off the authorities. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t. The mere suggestion of it made him just as guilty as you in their eyes.” She took a breath. “So I lost one son, my other son vanished—and don’t think for a second that your disappearance didn’t cause new and ugly rumors. And then this young girl of fifteen showed up on my front doorstep claiming to be pregnant with my dead son’s child. What kind of girl starts having sex at that age? She was a child, pregnant with a child.”

  “I’m surprised you believed the kid was Dante’s.”

  “I’m not a fool,” she snapped. “I’d seen this happen before in our circle; a rich man dies and a pregnant whore comes forward claiming the child is his. Before I offered her any financial compensation, I set up an in-utero DNA test. Those results valid
ated her claim. I provided her with a safe, discreet place to live for the duration of her pregnancy, and I provided a loving future for the child she did not want.”

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much money did her silence cost you?”

  “It doesn’t matter now if you know. I paid her a quarter of a million dollars. She signed every single legal stipulation without hesitation.”

  “Of course she did. She was fifteen fucking years old. That money probably sounded like a fortune to her.” He laughed bitterly. “The joke was on her. She walked away from a real fortune by not holding on to a JFW heir.”

  “Her stupidity was no concern of mine—then or now.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, if I would’ve known? I wouldn’t have let you give Dante’s kid away.”

  “Oh, spare me your indignation.” She sneered at him. “What kind of help would you have been, raising a baby? None. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Deacon. You didn’t have the skills to be anything to that boy except a fair-weather uncle. You would’ve disappointed him as much as you’d disappointed everyone else.”

  “Goddammit, Julianne, that’s enough. You don’t get to talk to him that way.”

  She whirled on her husband, her jaw nearly hanging on the floor. “You’re taking his side?”

  “There are no sides. He is our son.”

  “He is being an ass, as usual,” she hissed. “I hate that he’s standing there in judgment of me when he didn’t have to deal with the consequences of his actions! We did. We had to start over. He shows up, looking like a thug, full of contempt for me, for you, for everything we ever provided him. For the future in the family business that he refused to be a part of. And now, because of a legal technicality, he can destroy it.”

  Her venom paralyzed him. And like the snake she was, she slithered forward, eager to sink her fangs in for the kill.

  “What a slap in the face it is to your granddad that you changed the name you were born with. The name that entitles you to the inheritance that means you don’t have to hold down a real job. Deacon McConnell can work out, add more tattoos, get in the ring for three or four minutes and prove he’s tough. Why your grandfather didn’t cut you off astounds me.”

  And he was done. With all of this. For good. “I’ll tell you why Granddad didn’t cut me loose. Because when I came back after bein’ gone for years, he asked me why I left. He was the only one who did. Until Molly, he’s the only one I told.”

  Her eyes flashed fear. She shook her head—as if asking him to keep quiet.

  Fuck that. And fuck her.

  Deacon opened his mouth, and his mother moved in front of her husband. “Don’t listen to him, Bing. He’s caused enough problems over the years. Don’t let him make more for us now.”

  “Deacon.” His father’s eyes met his. “Tell me.”

  “Granddad knew. I don’t know how, but he was the one person who understood the kind of loss I suffered after Dante died. He knew there’d be no recovering from it.”

  “That’s because Dad had a twin who died when he was ten. He never spoke of him.”

  Now it made sense.

  “What did you tell him, son?”

  “What my mother said to me the night you left me with her.” Deacon looked over at her. “She told me she wished I would’ve died instead of Dante. I’d known for months I repulsed her every time she looked at me. But to hear her say that she hated me?” He took a breath. “Then she told me everyone would be better off if I disappeared because losing my family was what I deserved after killing her son.”

  Silence.

  Then his father made the most anguished noise Deacon had ever heard. He wheeled around, loomed over his wife, and yelled, “How could you?” right in her face.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Then explain it to me, Julianne! Explain to me why everything always comes back to you? I trusted you. I stood by you.”

  “But it’s not—”

  “No buts! Did you, or did you not, tell our only surviving son that you hated him and wished he were dead?”

  Tears rolled down her face.

  “Answer me, goddammit!”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t in my right mind! I don’t remember half of what I said! God, Bing. I was in such a fog of grief—”

  “Get. Out. Of. Here.”

  She dashed her tears away. “Bing! You don’t mean that.”

  His father’s face was pasty, and he looked to be in shock.

  Deacon locked eyes with his mother. “Go. Give him some space.”

  She backed away slowly. Then she turned and ran from the room.

  The vindication Deacon expected to feel didn’t happen.

  His dad lowered himself into the closest chair. Deacon followed suit.

  After a bit, Deacon said, “Dad?”

  “I . . . didn’t know.”

  Not an accusatory Why didn’t you tell me? “I know. What can I do now?”

  His father reached for his hand. “Just sit with me while I try to make sense of this.”

  “Sure.”

  Deacon tried not to show his impatience after they’d been sitting there in silence for half an hour. By the time another thirty minutes passed, he was damn near ready to crawl out of his skin.

  But this was his father’s way—quiet contemplation. Dante had been the same way.

  So does that mean you take after your mother?

  No. Fuck no.

  As much as he wanted to find Molly and tell her everything that’d happened tonight, it’d keep. She was strong enough to hold her own among this superficial crowd. And for the first time, maybe ever, Deacon didn’t walk away from his dad when he needed him.

  • • •

  MOLLY had been pacing in the hallway since Deacon had barreled past her. His rudeness should’ve pissed her off, but it didn’t. It scared her.

  She’d never seen him like that.

  So she’d heard the shouting inside the room but not the actual words exchanged. Whatever was going on . . . she knew it was bad.

  Her conscience, the part that loved him, urged her to go to him.

  But he had made it clear he didn’t want her involved.

  Isn’t this the way it goes with Deacon? He keeps you in the dark. He kept from you that the reason he agreed to come to Texas was for a JFW board meeting—for a board you didn’t even know he was on. You had no idea that he’d agreed to fight Watson—and you find out the same time as his family—the family he despises? Then he drops the bombshell about staying in Texas for training camp? Not to mention he ditched you today—and he abandoned you tonight. Now he’s rude and uncommunicative and you just shrug it off? Offer excuses for his behavior? When he’s exhibiting the same closemouthed behavior that sent you running from him the first time?

  She tried not to let the doubts get a foothold, but they already had. With each minute that passed, they only grew stronger.

  “I’d ask why you’re hiding—but I suspect a poor farm girl like you didn’t get invited to many parties like this growing up in a cornfield and you don’t know how to act.”

  Molly faced Clive. “How astute.”

  “I try.” Clive’s gaze flicked to the door, then back to her. “But you aren’t hiding because like Deacon you have zero social graces. So the question is, why are you out here and your beloved is in there?”

  She said nothing.

  “Sounds like a family fight and someone is unhappy. I’d ask you what’s going on, but it’s obvious you don’t know.”

  “How can you be sure I wasn’t tasked with watching the door so they didn’t get interrupted during their family meeting?”